Jonas Mekas Quotes About Film

Quotes about: Film

• My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

  Jonas Mekas

  Reality, Pay, Attention

  Interview with Peter BogdAnOvich, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 26, 2015.

• I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.

  Jonas Mekas

  Thinking, Scripts, Cameras

• Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing. Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order.

  Jonas Mekas

  New York, Reality, Order

• I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on - from life, friends, my own life.

  Jonas Mekas

  Stuff, Film, Internet

  "Jonas Mekas captures one moment at a time". Interview with Molly Glentzer, www.chron.com. November 15, 2013.

• Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.

  Jonas Mekas

  Brother, New York, Home

• Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.

  Jonas Mekas

  Technology, Giving, Tree

  "Short Films From a Long Life". Wired Interview, www.wired.com. December 19, 2006.

• As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.

  Jonas Mekas

  Confused, Eye, Way

  "iPOP | This Week on the Scene: NYFF, Wall Street, “Dirty Girl” & More" by Nigel M. Smith, www.indiewire.com. October 7, 2011.

• I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some will never be famous. But they are all my friends.

  Jonas Mekas

  Real, Film, Moments

• We need less perfect but more free films.

  Jonas Mekas

  Perfect, Needs, Film

  Jonas Mekas (2016). “Movie Journal: The Rise of New American Cinema, 1959-1971”, p.16, Columbia University Press

• I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called Film Culture.

  Jonas Mekas

  Jobs, New York, Editing

  "Jonas Mekas captures one moment at a time". Interview with Molly Glentzer, www.chron.com. November 15, 2013.

• In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.

  Jonas Mekas

  Film, Internet, Needed

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